A fast, private, fully self-contained news feed for Lawnchair's minus-one screen. Swipe right on your home screen and get real news from real publishers — no Google app, no tracking, no social media junk.
Google Discover mixes actual news with posts from X/Threads/TikTok and other engagement bait, and there's no real way to filter it. FreeFeed replaces the Discover panel entirely: it fetches stories straight from publisher RSS feeds, renders them natively, and gives you full control over what shows up.
- Direct publisher feeds — BBC, NYT, Guardian, WSJ, Ars Technica and more, fetched in parallel. Real article links, real thumbnails, no rate-limited middleman.
- Topics — Top stories, World, Nation, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Politics, Sports, Entertainment, each a chip at the top of the feed.
- Custom feeds — add any RSS/Atom URL and it becomes its own topic chip.
- Header tiles — up to ten glanceable widgets above the feed: weather (with tap-to-expand hourly forecast), stocks, crypto, calendar, steps, battery, sunrise/sunset, air quality, moon phase, and "on this day". Choose which show and in what order.
- Custom symbols — pick your own stock tickers (Yahoo Finance symbols) and crypto coins.
- Source blocklist — hide any publisher with one long-press, or edit patterns directly.
- Save for later — star stories and filter to just your saved list.
- Dark and light themes following the system setting.
- Aggressive prefetch — article images resolve and cache in the background so scrolling never waits on the network.
All data (weather, markets, air quality, Wikipedia) comes from free, keyless public APIs. Nothing phones home.
- Install a Lawnchair build that whitelists FreeFeed as a feed provider (see
release/or build the patched branch — PR to upstream pending). - Install
FreeFeed.apk. - In Lawnchair settings: General → Feed provider → FreeFeed.
- Swipe right on your home screen.
The calendar and steps tiles need the Calendar and Physical Activity runtime permissions; you'll be prompted if you enable them.
Requires JDK 17+ and the Android SDK (platform 35).
gradle assembleDebug
# APK lands in app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apkLawnchair verifies feed providers against a signature whitelist, and Android 14+ blocks background activity launches from bound services. The patch (three small changes, on the feature/freefeed-support branch of the fork) adds FreeFeed to the whitelist and passes BIND_ALLOW_ACTIVITY_STARTS when binding the overlay so article taps open.
MIT